It’s currently almost impossible to get on any form of public transport anywhere in the UK without seeing someone reading one of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice of Fire novels.

Since the critically acclaimed (and really rather wonderful) first season of the HBO television adaptation arrived on our screens last year, the series has exploded in popularity to the extent that we long standing fans have been forced to retreat back to our grimy hobbit holes and sneer at every Johnny Come-Lately who thinks they’ve figured out who the Prince That Was Promised really is.

Some of you may remember Tenacious D, half band, half one of the world’s most effective ways of convincing attractive young women to have sex with a fat old man.

That was fine while it lasted, you’re probably thinking, but surely there’s no more creative juice to be wrung from a mushed up pulp of heavy metal, comedy and demons. Well, you would be incorrect, because Todd and the Book of Pure Evil is a Canadian comedy show pitched very much in that zone. Read more of this post

After escaping from the mines last week, he and what’s left of his merry band ended up wandering through a vast forest with Roman legionaries picking them off one by one. It’s a bit of a stress, frankly and the huge weird forest the action takes place in is bloody creepy. It’s a bit like Gladiator meets Grimm.

It’s worth pointing that in Roman times, huge swathes of Europe were entirely given over to woodland so wandering around a forest for days on end without a clue where you were was entirely feasible. One rather suspects that getting lost in the forest and eaten by wolves/bears/witches was one of the leading causes of death for Europeans up until the late Middle Ages. Read more of this post

Like this:

We live in an age of anti-heroes. No one gets to be a good old-fashioned knight any more: strong, true and brave. The only thing you can be sure of is the nagging suspicion that even the best person out there is only marginally better than the alternative.

Enter Homeland, which is all about shades of gray and features a hero so flawed she’s basically a villain. Claire Danes plays the lead, Carrie Mathison, a FBI agent so damaged she makes Lindsay Lohan look like a model for well adjusted living.

She has a schizophrenic-esque mental disorder, no regard for legal propriety, doesn’t care about her colleagues, uses her sexuality as a desperately blunt tool to advance whatever she thinks is a good idea at the time, is a raging egomaniac and she likes jazz.

The problem with rabbiting on about how great a show Spartacus is, is that to the casual viewer it can still look very much like a non-stop locomotive of sex and violence.

It’s all very well my praising the character development and cunning politicking but the very first thing anyone tuning in last week would have seen is someone being stabbed right in the eye. But not in a subtle way that allows your imagination to fill in the gaps left by what’s on screen. No, this was a bloody great sword going in someone’s eyehole and right through to their brain. Read more of this post